By Walter Alarkon, The Hill

 Obama is ready to throw some more money at the problem

The cost of a new jobs bill Democrats hope to move early next year runs to nearly $300 billion when major proposals under serious consideration are added up.

Lawmakers are calling for extending aid to the unemployed, infrastructure spending, a hiring tax credit and increased small business loans.

A number of the  jobs proposals backed by Democrats make up a $230 billion package proposed by Mark Zandi of  Moody’s Economy.com, who made a presentation to  Senate Democrats Wednesday. The provisions

supported by Zandi along with new spending on infrastructure, a favored approach of top House Democrats, would cost between $291 billion and $299 billion, according to estimates by lawmakers and economists.
Aides cautioned that Democratic leaders in both chambers are just beginning to consider what will go into the bill, and that estimates based on standalone bills may not mesh with the final jobs legislation.

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By Lynn Sweet, Politics Daily

 Obama is ready to party this holiday season

The Obama White House kicks off a giant holiday social season this week, I’ve learned: 28 parties and open houses planned for December, with more than 50,000 people expected.

The mega-entertaining sprint, overseen by First Lady Michelle Obama’s East Wing Social Office, comes in the wake of a security breach at the Obamas’ Nov. 24 state dinner where Tareq and Michaele Salahi, TV reality-show aspirants, whizzed through security checkpoints even though they were not on the 320-person guest list. The Social Office will be more vigilent now, the East Wing said Tuesday.

The Salahis told NBC Tuesday they were not party crashers, but they did not explain why they had the impression they were welcome at the dinner.

I asked Camille Y. Johnston, communications chief for Michelle Obama, for details about the upcoming party season. “This holiday season, more than 50,000 people will visit the White House’s 17 holiday parties and 11 open houses,” she said.

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By Jason Zengerle, The New Republic

 Lots of talk: No Jobs

Barack Obama convened his first official summit before he was even elected president. In October 2008, then-candidate Obama gathered a gaggle of business and political heavyweights–Paul Volcker, Eric Schmidt, Jennifer Granholm, Bill Richardson, etc.–in a Florida community college gymnasium for what his campaign billed as the “Growing American Jobs Summit.” “No cheerleading,” Obama admonished the 1,700 people who packed into the sweltering gym expecting a campaign rally. “We’ve got serious work to be done.” And then, for the next 90 minutes, Obama and the assembled worthies engaged in a wonky discussion that ranged from ideas for fixing the country’s electrical grid to calls for reforming its banking system.

It should hardly have been a surprise, then, that Obama would go a bit summit-crazy once he was actually in the White House. Little more than a month after taking office, he held a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” where he solicited ideas for battling the deficit; a few weeks after that he hosted a “Health Care Summit” to kick off his drive for health care reform; and later still came the “H1N1 Preparedness Summit” and the “Distracted Driving Summit.”

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I am here demonstrating against the war because I am appalled and alarmed that once against we are escalating the war.    And the idea that there are benchmarks for getting out is a myth and a lie.  The fact is that you cannot imagine a scenario where six months from now or eighteen months from now the administration would say well we did not meet our benchmarks therefore we are leaving.  This is an absolute tragedy for the people of the Mideast, for Afghanistan and for us.

Watch the financial news and you will see continued job cuts each month. We are not alone in our strategy. Far from it. Atlas has shrugged all over the country. [Emphasis added.]

Like many business owners, we are no longer willing to take all of the financial and legal risks and put up with all of the aggravation of owning and running a business. Not with the prospects of even higher taxes, more regulation, more litigation and more emboldened bureaucrats on the horizon.  Like others we know, we are getting out while the getting is, well, tolerable. 

Liberals seem to be clueless as to where “the money” comes from.  They love to tax, regulate and redistribute wealth — all the while decrying the very profit motive that created it — something they do not understand.

The lay-offs of November 2008 – which will be part of George W. Bush’s statistical record – fall in reality on the Obama election. Business owners understand that the election just gave a lot more power to who think like the Illinois liberal “President elect” who chose another Illinois liberal for his Chief of Staff (and) Michigan liberals for his economic team.  Illinois and Michigan are broke!

In the first Capitol Hill airing of the issue, House Republicans Wednesday read excerpts from at least eight of the e-mails, saying they showed the world needs to re-examine experts’ claims that the science on warming is settled. One e-mail from 2003 was by John Holdren, then of Harvard University and now the president’s science adviser.

The exploding controversy led Phil Jones to step aside as head of the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, the source of the e-mail exchanges. The university is investigating the matter. Penn State University also is looking into e-mails by its own researcher, Michael Mann. House Republicans asked for a separate hearing or investigation into the issue, but were rebuffed by Democrats.

“These e-mails show a pattern of suppression, manipulation and secrecy that was inspired by ideology, condescension and profit,” said U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

The science is proper and this is about a small fraction of research on the issue, said Holdren, a physicist who has studied climate change.

“The e-mails do nothing to undermine the very strong scientific consensus … that tells us the earth is warming, that warming is largely a result of human activity,” said another government scientist Jane Lubchenco. A marine biologist and climate researcher, she heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The e-mails don’t negate or even deal with data from both NOAA and NASA, which keep independent climate records and show dramatic warming, Lubchenco told members of the House global warming committee.

The hearing was supposed to focus on the latest in global warming scientific findings. Lubchenco even attempted a high school chemistry lesson with two quick experiments at the witness table. Donning one rubber glove, she demonstrated how adding carbon dioxide to water made it more acidic and said that is what’s now happening in the world’s oceans. Then she put chalk in acidic water compounds and showed it dissolving a bit, to demonstrate what will happen eventually to vital sea life.

But her bubble-inducing experiments were ignored in favor of the more explosive e-mails.

Among the messages that Sensenbrenner read was one from Jones, the East Anglia scientist, in which he wrote about a “trick of adding in the real temps” in an exchange about long-term climate trends. Holdren responded that the word “trick” did not mean manipulation of data, but about a “clever way” to tackle a problem. Another Jones’ e-mail read, “I would like to see the climate change happen so the science could be proved right.”

Defending the scientists, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., said somehow the e-mails aren’t stopping the Arctic from warming, the oceans from getting more acidic, and glaciers from melting. He sarcastically asked Holdren and Lubchenco if they were part of a global conspiracy that even included fictional movie villain organizations. Holdren, played along, saying he was not.

After complaining of “scientific fascism” and “scientific McCarthyism,” Sensenbrenner chastised Holdren for his 2003 e-mail, when he was at Harvard, that dealt with skeptics by “calling them names.”

What the e-mail, not read by Sensenbrenner, showed was that Holdren used ironic quotes around the word “Harvard” in describing two of his colleagues who are global warming skeptics. Holdren also had forwarded to other scientists an article he described as “for your entertainment” in which he was quoted as saying the two skeptics were “wrong.” Holdren defended his e-mail.

Sensenbrenner attacked the work of Penn State’s Mann, who is frequently brought up in the communications. Mann is the author of what is called the “hockey stick” theory, first described in the late 1990s. It suggested that the past 50 years had been the hottest in several centuries, if not 1,000 years, and that man-made global warming was to blame. That research was so controversial that the National Academy of Sciences studied the work in depth; it was used in former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming.

Sensenbrenner said the 2006 National Academy study showed Mann’s hockey stick was incorrect and that Mann’s theory was discredited. But Holdren said the NAS study had quibbles with Mann’s methods but agreed with his results.

The chairman of the Academy of Science panel, Texas A&M University atmospheric scientist Gerald North, confirmed in an interview Wednesday that Holdren was right, not Sensenbrenner.

“The conclusions that we came to were essentially the same as the hockey stick” theory that Mann proposed, North told The Associated Press. North said even if Jones, Mann and others had done no research at all, the world would still be warming and scientists would still be able to show it.

___

Roaring Republican:

“The United States and Russia do not intend to, and cannot, create the future government of Afghanistan. It is up to the Afghans themselves to determine their future.” – Joint US/Russia release on Afghanistan – November 13th 2001

The comedian Sam Kinison had a routinue that described succinctly and almost eloquently, in its own way, our past and current travails. Noting the futility of programs to ease hunger, sold through celebrity television charity pitches, he would speak into the microphone as if speaking to a suffering family in Africa or the Middle East. “You live in the (expletive) desert,” he would yell, “move to where the food is!” Pretending to pickup clumps of silicone he would add, “You see this? This is sand, nothing grows here, you live in the desert!”

Our war in Afghanistan has hit its obvious conclusion. It is the same conclusion that was met by every outside nation that ever entered the land, though our battle is far less bloody and costly in comparison to what other nations have endured. In the end, no matter what we do, we will be incapable of forcing order in Afghanistan and will leave knowing that it will only be a matter of time before some other lunatic steps in to brutalize and then organize the people to attack us and our allies.

In reality, despite all the whining from the left, we never entered Afghanistan as an occupier, as an Empire or as Ann Coulter put the alternative, as people looking to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Had any of those been our posture or strategy in Afghanistan, we may have found a definitive outcome. Instead we started our journey as a response to 9/11. It then became a humanitarian and nation building exercise. Unable to build that nation, incapable of finding a population wanting for western style democracy, our engine has sputtered and our enemies realigned and reinvigorated. Worse, we have lost our resolve.

Afghanistan is in fact a wasteland. I realize my ethnocentrism but I also realize that some 9/11 hijackers came to America and spent their time in strip clubs before committing cold blooded murder in an attempt to achieve the ability to deflower invisible virgins in the afterlife. Born to the hellish nightmare of living in a country incapable of producing more than some oil and drugs, we shouldn’t be surprised that more than a few of these seeds have grown into withering plants rotting in the sun.

While I know there are good and decent people in Afghanistan, let’s not pretend a small band with a home-brewed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Paine and Samual Adams is currently hanging around in one of the many holes dug into the sand. Great minds don’t seem to be there. The spirit of our own revolution is not either and that spirit cannot simply be aroused or bludgeoned into people.

In reality, revolutions like ours and the many others that were sparked from it, must happen internally. Liberal progressivism maintains that simple coercion, Government action or community organized action can rouse liberation. Neo conservatism took this leftist love of Government sponsored liberation and ran the Republican Party into the ground.

While many voices on the left continue to scorn our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, those same people complain that our government stayed silent in Rwanda and would happily see government action in the Sudan. They complain about the money wasted in our endeavors not because they wish us to have saved it, but because they wish it had been spend on their own plans for “liberation” around the world and in America’s cities. They believe the Bush administration was wrong to tell Afghans and Iraqi’s how to live their lives because they feel it is their job to do exactly that here in America.

The coin is mangled on both sides. Our nation was failed by the Bush administration just as it is being failed by Obama’s. Democrats and Republicans, elected to represent and defend the people, blew it. We are now being told by a Democrat president what we were told by a Republican, that our future lies in Afghani’s embracing freedom, democracy, equality and sensible religion. If our future depends on that, we don’t really have one.

Like most people in the world, Afghani men want sex and power. In societal systems where polygamy exists, the wealthy men have multiple wives and bare children. The rest of the men go wanting. In such societal systems, women are abused and bound. They are commodities that are trafficked, abused and demoralized. Worst of all, they are dehumanized and turned into the enemy to be vilified by all of society.

Regardless of what Islam may be in its natural spirit, in Afghanistan and large parts of the world, it is perverted into a despicable and ruthless system of abuse and control. To pretend otherwise is to embrace futility. To pretend that this perversion is in any way similar to modern Christianity or Judaism as practiced by millions of the faithful in the United States, is ignorant.

Our problem is that the men who have no access to women or power, do have access to this perversion of religion. They are told the other life will provide them all they lack in this one and then offered the brutal way forward.

The United States, in comparison, hasn’t changed the fundamentals. With women still a commodity, power lacking for the average Afghani, and land still incapable of sustaining their livelihood, we offer them a life lacking but without a brutal way forward that will provide for them in the afterlife. Worse for our pitch, the Afghanis have always known we will leave. Last night, our President, made that clear. With perverted Islam guaranteed to come back, is it any surprise they choose the dark side?

We know what will happen to the many Afghani’s who embraced the United States when we leave. Their fate will be far worse than just death. In Iraq, the bodies of our allies were found in piles, having been tortured with fire and power tools, beheaded and worse. This is undoubtedly the fate of the Afghan civilian army and police, whatever that actually is.

Our experiment a failure, the alternative is that we stay forever in Afghanistan and ship in all of the necessities and comforts the people are incapable of producing themselves. This will drain and destroy our own society and lead to our further descent into socialized madness. I cannot support socialism at home, how can I justify it abroad?

We removed the tyrants from power with swift force after 9/11. They were replaced by incompetence, fanaticism and regional tyrants. The imaginary line that distinguishes Pakistan from Afghanistan keeps our troops from killing the original tyrants, making certain they will return. At this point, as disgusting of a thought as it may be, our only hope is that we leave Afghanistan with two warring factions of tyrants brutally slaughtering one another to a standstill. The worst outcome is that they simply join hands and come back at us with a much larger nightmare than we dare imagine.

The demoralizing effect of losing the War in Afghanistan will have untold repercussions on our society. The collective guilt would be overwhelming. We would know many who perpetrated 9/11 are still in the desserts plotting another attack. Actions have reactions and in human terms they are not just physical but psychological as well. Our society can only withstand so much and at this moment of overwhelming economic and societal decline, we do not need this.

Our country will prevail, it always has. Our future is brighter than our past, of this I am sure. We are, however, in a dark and perilous time. We have no solution for Afghanistan and I am not sure for Iraq either. Our economy is on a path toward absolute destruction and our nation turning against a leader who promised hope, change and unification of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and orientation. We are fracturing too fast to properly mend and with the inability to vilify those on the outside, we will turn within.

By Kara Rowland, Washington Times

 Let’s only invite people who agree with me…

Facing rising unemployment rates and having seen uncertain results from the stimulus bill, President Obama is hosting a “jobs summit” at the White House Thursday that will be packed with business leaders and economists supportive of White House policies but lacks a diversity of opinion, several analysts say.

Missing from a partial list of attendees released by the White House are the self-proclaimed voices of business – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business – both of which have been critical of Mr. Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.

Confirmed attendees include liberal economists credited with shaping the $787 billion stimulus package, union leaders, environmental advocates and executives from Google and other blue-chip firms.

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By George Will, Real Clear Politics

 Obama is making some big assumptions in his Afghan plan

A traveler asks a farmer how to get to a particular village. The farmer replies, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.” Barack Obama, who asked to be president, nevertheless deserves sympathy for having to start where America is in Afghanistan.

But after 11 months of graceless disparagements of the 43rd president, the 44th acts as though he is the first president whose predecessor bequeathed a problematic world. And Obama’s second new Afghanistan policy in less than nine months strikingly resembles his predecessor’s plan for Iraq, which was: As Iraq’s security forces stand up, U.S. forces will stand down.

Having vowed to “finish the job,” Obama revealed Tuesday that he thinks the job in Afghanistan is to get out of Afghanistan. This is an unserious policy.

Obama’s surge will bring to 51,000 his Afghanistan escalation since March. Supposedly this will buy time for Afghan forces to become adequate. But it is not intended to buy much time: Although the war is in its 98th month, Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” banner will be unfurled 19 months from now — when Afghanistan’s security forces supposedly will be self-sufficient. He must know this will not happen.

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And if that wasn’t boon enough to our enemies, Obama offered them an extra token – before our announced withdrawal date of July 2011, he will generously offer them 30,000 more American soldiers to shoot at for the next year and a half. Surely target practice is all our soldiers will be, having been told in advance that they will be coming home scarcely before they can load their own weapons.

Obama’s gall is nothing short of astounding: He dares to travel to a group of soldiers, to tell them to their face, that he is sending them to fight and die in a battle that he has no intention of letting them win; that they will be pulled from the battle-field in time to placate his left-wing base for the 2012 election.

Imagine Abraham Lincoln saying to a group of soldiers in 1862, “Men, I’m sending you south to fight, but only for eighteen months; after all, we can’t let this unpopular war jeopardize my re- election chances, can we?” How would the Union troops have reacted? How would the Confederate troops have reacted? How, indeed, could our nation have survived such a craven calculation?

It could not have, of course. Lincoln committed his full resources, and the full resources of the nation, to the fight against the Slave Power: “I expect to maintain this contest,” he wrote “until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me.” Such manliness seems mythic in our Age of Iron; men of Lincoln’s mettle seem as giants who once roamed the earth in a distant, Golden Age of spirit and courage. Certainly the man-child who now wields the awesome power of the Presidency is but the faintest facsimile of such a glorious creature.

Obama is blunt about the reason for his disinterest in the Afghan war: “The nation that I am most interested in building is our own,” he told the cadets. By build, of course, he means dismantle – by nationalizing whole industries, for instance, and indeed, whole sectors of our economy.

Besides, he made clear to our soldiers, Afghanistan isn’t much worth fighting for anyway. The Afghan government, he says, “has been hampered by corruption.” This coming from a man whose allies recently bribed Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) with $300 million for her health care vote.

The end result of Obama’s surge-then-surrender strategy is not hard to foresee. The Taliban will wait us out, then move in and butcher whichever poor Afghans were foolish enough to cast their lot with the United States. Girls and women will be re-enslaved; al-Qaeda fighters will flood in, confident that no matter how hard they hit us, we will never have the will to finish them off.

Having re-taken Afghanistan, they will plot their return to America, to once again paint our skies in fire and blood.

Matt Patterson is a National Review Institute Washington Fellow and the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.” His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com

According to Solomon, there is new evidence to support Russian and Ukranian geological scientists who are convinced that the time-honored and universally-taught belief that petroleum deposits are derived exclusively from long-dead plants and dinosaurs is about as scientifically sound as the concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Rather, they say, hydrocarbons may be developed in an abiotic process by the high temperatures and huge pressures existing far below the earth’s 25 mile deep mantle, some 40 to 95 miles beneath our feet. This theory, first proposed in 1877 by Mendeleev, inventor of the periodic table (which should vouch for his scientific credentials) has been widely accepted by Russian/Ukranian earth scientists since the early 1950’s. According to this abiogenic theory, existing pools of petroleum are being continually replenished and new ones being created as newly-formed hydrocarbons migrate upward through cracks in the mantle.

While the concept has had little past support in the West, an article published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience, co-authored by the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the  Lomonosov State Academy of Fine Chemical Technology in Moscow and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, reports research that indicates this process is scientifically viable.

In other words, the world itself may be the world’s largest oil producer in an ongoing natural process. If these scientists are right, rather than running out of oil as the doomsayers loudly proclaim, we may have an endless supply.

Russ Vaughn

Female Conservative Derangement Syndrome has spread across the pond. The Observer of London spotlights the “extreme” women in American politics that give them the willies.

Boo!

She is a striking brunette with a decidedly outspoken attitude. She lambasts President Barack Obama as a socialist and has become the darling of America’s right-wing activists who flock to her appearances. She is hated by liberals and loved by conservatives.

Sarah Palin? Not quite. Meet Michele Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota who is being hailed as a new and increasingly powerful voice in American politics.

Bachmann, at 53, is a darling of the so-called Tea Party movement, which has campaigned vociferously against healthcare reform, the economic stimulus package and legislation to combat climate change. Her followers have been behind mass rallies in Washington and smaller ones all over the country. She has emerged as one of the most visible politicians in America, frequently appearing on the conservative Fox News channel, whose hosts often champion her causes.

She is part of an increasingly visible “female brand” of conservatism that is rising in America in the wake of the election of Obama. They include notable syndicated commentators such as Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, whose dislike for liberals has grown ever more shrill in recent months. And, of course, Palin herself. She is still a giant of the political and media landscape and next week embarks on a book tour to sell her autobiography. It has already sparked a media frenzy, with a heavily hyped appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s show, and become a huge bestseller on pre-orders alone.

All these women express a mood of conservative discontent that is becoming increasingly vocal and, some experts warn, extreme.

Yes, we’re “extreme.”

No apologies here for being extremely outraged at Washington’s ongoing generational theft, extremely mortified at our imperiled national security, extremely aggravated at the globe-trotting groveler-in-chief, and extremely disgusted with business-as-usual cronyism, pay-for-play thuggery in the Obama White House.

This is no time for mealy-mouthed moderation.

The only thing kowtowing will get you is rug burn.

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama’s speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond “enthusiastically” to the speech. But it didn’t help: The soldiers’ reception was cool.

One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama’s speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.

Just in Time for the Campaign

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the “world’s great religions.” He promised that responsibility for the country’s security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai — a government which he said was “corrupt.” The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars,” he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Obama’s Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama’s magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

It is not he himself who has changed, but rather the benchmark used to evaluate him. For a president, the unit of measurement is real life. A leader is seen by citizens through the prism of their lives — their job, their household budget, where they live and suffer. And, in the case of the war on terror, where they sometimes die.

Political dreams and yearnings for the future belong elsewhere. That was where the political charmer Obama was able to successfully capture the imaginations of millions of voters. It is a place where campaigners — particularly those with a talent for oration — are fond of taking refuge. It is also where Obama set up his campaign headquarters, in an enormous tent called “Hope.”

In his speech on America’s new Afghanistan strategy, Obama tried to speak to both places. It was two speeches in one. That is why it felt so false. Both dreamers and realists were left feeling distraught.

The American president doesn’t need any opponents at the moment. He’s already got himself.

URL:

• http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,664753,00.html

RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:

• Afghanistan Speech at West Point: Obama’s Half-Hearted Surge (12/02/2009)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,664682,00.html
• Obama’s New Afghanistan Strategy: Reactions from Around the World
  http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-49391.html
• New Afghanistan Strategy: The Full Text of Obama’s West Point Speech (12/02/2009)
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• Photo Gallery: Obama Presents His New Afghanistan Strategy
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• Preparing for Afghanistan: The Marines’ Factory of War (12/01/2009)
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• SPIEGEL Interview with Pakistan’s Prime Minister: ‘American Drone Attacks Are Counterproductive’ (12/01/2009)
  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,664328,00.html
• Interview with US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke: ‘We’re Not in Afghanistan to Build a Perfect Democracy’ (11/24/2009)
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• US Foreign Policy: Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage (11/23/2009)
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• SPIEGEL 360: Our Complete Afghanistan Coverage
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Lead Story

By PETER WEHNER, Commentary Magazine

Obama’s Ineptitude is being revealed

The overseas reviews for President Obama’s foreign policy are starting to pour in — and they’re not favorable. Bob Ainsworth, the British defense secretary, has blamed Obama for the decline in British public support for the war in Afghanistan. According to the Telegraph:

Mr. Ainsworth took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing the U.S. President and his delays in sending more troops to bolster the mission against the Taliban. A “period of hiatus” in Washington — and a lack of clear direction — had made it harder for ministers to persuade the British public to go on backing the Afghan mission in the face of a rising death toll, he said. Senior British Government sources have become increasingly frustrated with Mr. Obama’s “dithering” on Afghanistan, the Daily Telegraph disclosed earlier this month, with several former British defense chiefs echoing the concerns.

The President is “Obama the Impotent,” according to Steven Hill of the Guardian. The Economist calls Obama the “Pacific (and pussyfooting) president.” The Financial Times refers to “relations between the U.S. and Europe, which started the year of talks as allies, near breakdown.” The German magazine Der Spiegel accuses the president of being “dishonest with Europe” on the subject of climate change. Another withering piece in Der Spiegel, titled “Obama’s Nice Guy Act Gets Him Nowhere on the World Stage,” lists the instances in which Obama is being rolled. The Jerusalem Post puts it this way: “Everybody is saying no to the American president these days. And it’s not just that they’re saying no, it’s also the way they’re saying no.” “He talks too much,” a Saudi academic who had once been smitten with Barack Obama tells the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. The Saudi “has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory,” according to Ajami. But “he is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.”

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FOXNews

 Obama’s approach has yielded no results

The Obama administration on Monday said Iran’s plan to build 10 more nuclear enrichment  facilities and expand to a half-million centrifuges was “unacceptable” — but once again, in the face of yet another deadline, it offered no specific response beyond wait-and-see.

On at least four occasions this year, President Obama has set deadlines for Iran to comply with international demands that it demonstrate transparency and cooperation on nuclear developments. 

But the Islamic Republic has blatantly ignored all deadlines set by Obama and the United Nations to freeze its uranium enrichment program, prompting critics to say that another “deadline” will have little, if any, impact.

Iran announced ambitious plans Sunday to construct another 10 nuclear facilities after the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, called on it to halt work on a uranium enrichment plant.

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